Peer Production Participation Project – Dota 2 AI Scripting on Steam Workshop

Meng Zhang

2018-05-01

Steam Workshop

Steam Workshop is affiliated to Steam, a digital distribution platform developed by Valve Corporation. It is a central hub of player-created content and tools to publish, organize, and download that content into your games.

A webpage of Steam Workshop

Dota 2 AI scripting

Dota 2 is a multi-player Online Battle Area game. Apart from playing with human players, we can also play with bots.
The default bot is weak so Valve opened the AI scripting on the Workshop so that we can program our custom AI script.

A lot of AI scripts available on Steam Workshop

My project

My project is called Ranked Matchmaking AI. The main developer hopes this script can simulate the experience of playing with human players.

Our project’s homepage

My project

Our project’s GitHub page

My Participation

I first forked the project and cloned it to my local host.
Then I learned the grammar of Lua and studied the source code.
Several days later I started to modify the code.
I sent my first pull request on March 23rd and got approved.

The changeLog of my first update

My Participation

Part of my codes:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--  Ranked Matchmaking AI v1.5b 
--  Author: adamqqq     Email:adamqqq@163.com
--  Contributor: zmcmcc Email:mengzhang@utexas.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------
-- General Initialization
--------------------------------------
local utility = require( GetScriptDirectory().."/utility" ) 
require(GetScriptDirectory() ..  "/ability_item_usage_generic")

local debugmode=false
local npcBot = GetBot()
local Talents ={}
local Abilities ={}
local AbilitiesReal ={}

ability_item_usage_generic.InitAbility(Abilities,AbilitiesReal,Talents) 

local AbilityToLevelUp=
{
    Abilities[3],
    Abilities[1],
    Abilities[1],
    Abilities[3],
    Abilities[3],
    Abilities[4],
    Abilities[3],
    Abilities[2],
    Abilities[2],
    "talent",
    Abilities[2],
    Abilities[4],
    Abilities[2],
    Abilities[1],
    "talent",
    Abilities[1],
    "nil",
    Abilities[4],
    "nil",
    "talent",
    "nil",
    "nil",
    "nil",
    "nil",
    "talent",
}
local TalentTree={
    function()
        return Talents[1]
    end,
    function()
        return Talents[3]
    end,
    function()
        return Talents[5]
    end,
    function()
        return Talents[8]
    end
}

-- check skill build vs current level
utility.CheckAbilityBuild(AbilityToLevelUp)

function AbilityLevelUpThink()
    ability_item_usage_generic.AbilityLevelUpThink2(AbilityToLevelUp,TalentTree)
end

--------------------------------------
-- Ability Usage Thinking
--------------------------------------
local cast={} cast.Desire={} cast.Target={} cast.Type={}
local Consider ={}
local CanCast={utility.NCanCast,utility.NCanCast,utility.NCanCast,utility.UCanCast}
local enemyDisabled=utility.enemyDisabled

My Achievement (Until 4.21)

Contributed 8 commits with changes of 8000+ lines.
Help made updates of the script from v1.4e to 1.5c.
Subscribers of our script increased by 100000 in a month.
Created a testing script to test beta versions and attracted 7000+ subscribers.
Comments from Russia, Luxemburg, Malaysia, America, China and Peru.

My contribution on Github

My Achievement (Until 4.21)

Some guys even complain that the bots are too strong…

My bots got twice kills as real human team did…